Regions and Availability Zones for Lightsail

When creating resources in Amazon Lightsail, create them in an AWS Region that is closer to your users. You can also leverage multiple Availability Zones for fault tolerance and high availability with your applications. By provisioning resources closer to your users, your users can benefit from lower latency and increased performance. For example, if your blog traffic comes mostly from Switzerland, choose Frankfurt or Paris.

If your application would benefit from being created in an opt-in Region (Region that is disabled by default) that is supported for Lightsail, you can enable the Region. If you later decide that you no longer want to operate resources in an opt-in Region, you can disable the Region. For more information about opt-in Regions, see Considerations before enabling and disabling Regions and the opt-in Region entry in the AWS Glossary.

Regions for Lightsail

Lightsail is available in the following Regions.

* This Region is disabled by default. You must enable the Region before you can use it.

SSH keys and Lightsail Regions

In Lightsail, as soon as you create an instance in an AWS Region, we create a Default SSH key in that Region. This default key can be used to connect to instances only in that specific Region. For more information, see SSH key pairs.

Tips for working with Lightsail Regions

Each AWS Region is designed to be completely isolated from other AWS Regions. This achieves the greatest possible fault tolerance and stability.

All communication between Regions occurs across the public internet. Therefore, you should use the appropriate encryption methods to protect your data. There is a charge for data transfer between Regions. For more information, see Amazon EC2 Pricing - Data Transfer.

When you work with a Lightsail instance using the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), we recommend that you specify the code for the Region using the --region option in your AWS CLI command. For example, you can specify us-east-1 to return information about DNS zones and network resources in the US East (N. Virginia) (us-east-1) Region. For more information about using the AWS CLI --region option, see General Options in the AWS CLI Reference.

Lightsail Availability Zones

Each AWS Region has multiple, isolated Availability Zones, which are indicated by a letter following the Region name (us-east-2a). Availability Zones are collections of data centers that run on physically distinct, independent infrastructure. Availability Zones are engineered to be highly reliable. Common points of failure such as generators and cooling equipment are not shared between Availability Zones. Availability Zones are also physically separate so that even an extreme disaster such as a fire, tornado, or flood will affect only the single Availability Zone where it occurred.

You can create Lightsail instances in only one Availability Zone at a time. You might not see all Availability Zones at the time you create your instance. If you don't see the list of Availability Zones at all, be sure that you have selected a Region in the previous step.

Availability Zones and your Lightsail application

By launching your instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from a failure in a single location. Before you proceed with such a configuration, review the general and application specific guidelines. For more information, see Configure Lightsail instances for load balancing.

To proceed with scaling an existing instance to make your application available in multiple Availability Zones, first create a snapshot of your instance. Next, choose another Availability Zone when you create a new instance from the snapshot you created. With the new instance created from the snapshot, you can distribute web traffic to the instances with a Lightsail load balancer.